The major questions surrounding the coming elections do not really concern the KMT. There are few unknowns with the party that ruled for forty years under martial law and which, despite temporarily relinquishing the presidency to Chen in 2000, has never lost its majority in the legislature (in combination with allied parties). The KMT will argue that close ties to China are inevitable and desirable, that Ma has taken the hard decisions that will benefit Taiwan in the long run, and that the KMT is not to blame for problems in the global economy outside of their control. KMT candidates will distance themselves personally from the unpopular Ma, which, given the president’s reputation for aloofness and alienating associates, should not be too painful for them. And they will rehash the Zhu Rongji sound bite that refuses to die: Taiwanese independence means war (despite the fact that the KMT and DPP share the fundamental position that Taiwan, in the guise of the Republic of China, is already independent). The pertinent question is whether the DPP can conceive a sufficiently convincing China platform that Taiwanese voters will give their redistributive policies a chance. The DPP has resumed its championing of welfare and economic justice issues that had previously been subsumed under Chen’s identity politics. For many Taiwanese, economic realities are the most pressing, and the DPP has distinct advantages on this issue. Yet it still needs to inoculate against the zombie-like persistence of the false equation that the DPP equals economically damaging, and perhaps worse, instability in cross-Strait relations.

To do so will require a careful calibration of the party’s message on Taiwanese identity. Although the party’s sympathies align with public opinion, it has found it difficult to articulate a vision for the nation’s identity that does not also invoke problematic relations with China. A comprehensive review of its China platform undertaken earlier this year through an open consultation process provided an indication of the difficulty inherent in appealing to voters’ sense of Taiwanese identity, while reassuring them that they have a workable China policy. Ultimately, the party’s compromise position made no real advance on the “Taiwan Consensus” that played a role, possibly a decisive one, in Tsai’s failure in 2012. Belying his later image as a nationalist ideologue, Chen Shui-bian’s campaign for president in 2000 barely mentioned identity themes (let alone anything that could have been construed as “independence talk”). So the party can win a national election without exploiting their advantages on Taiwanese identity. But Chen received less than 40 percent of the vote and only won because James Soong stood as an independent and split the KMT vote with Lien Chan. The conundrum for the DPP is that the Taiwanese identity that has been trampled on and discarded under Ma is both a trump card and a liability.

Jonathan Sullivan is associate professor and deputy director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @jonlsullivan.

Image: Flickr/Jack View/CC by-sa 2.0